I have always loved silent movies. I find the actors’ gestures to be more powerful than stiff acting with tons of dialogue. Blah, blah, blah! When I was in graduate school, working with stroke victims, I was told that silent movies could be used for rehab therapy to help brain injured people to analyze nonverbal body language and facial expression. I now use them in my sessions with young students to encourage social thinking skills, nonverbal reasoning and inferencing (making educated guesses), facial emotion identification, and prediction. I guide them to notice the “facts” they are seeing by stopping the action and discussing what they see and then moving to the motives behind the body language. I mostly use the fun slapstick classics, W. C. Fields, Charley Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. For some big belly laughs I use Fatty Arbuckle. There is nothing as wonderful as the sound of that joyous laughter! For many, it is a moment of freedom from the straight jacket of their rule-bound rigid thinking.

Do you know someone who needs a good belly laugh while they work on what is hard for them? Let’s talk! CONTACT ME.